Favorite Glazed Sugar Cookies

Over the past year, we’ve had a family project at my house of taking the many boxes of old negatives from the last 25 years (basically my entire adult life!) and scanning the negatives and photos. I came across some really cute photos of my sons when they were little, helping to decorate sugar cookies. That was always one of their favorite past-times (and truth be told, they still like decorating cookies!).

I’ve used the same recipe over the years, and thought I’d post it here.

FAVORITE SUGAR COOKIES

1 cup butter, softened
1 ½ cups powdered sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
½ tsp. almond extract
2 ½ cups unbleached white or all purpose flour
1/8 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar

Cream butter and sugar together. Add egg and extracts and blend thoroughly. Stir in flour, salt, soda and cream of tartar until well-blended. Refrigerate for 30-60 minutes, to make dough easy to work with. Roll dough onto a lightly floured surface to about ¼ to 1/8 inch thick. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Lightly coat baking sheet with cooking oil spray. Bake cookies for 7 to 8 minutes, or until they are slightly golden around edges. Colored sugar or sprinkles can be added to cookies before baking. Or, frost and decorate cookies after they are baked and cooled on rack.

In the above photo, my sons just put sprinkles on cookies for decorations. In recent years, I’ve been decorating my cut-out cookies by “painting” them with a glaze. (After all, the point of decorating the cookies was no longer for my kids to have fun decorating them with sprinkles—and eating sprinkles! Now I wanted the cookies to look a little more professional—kind of like what you might see at a bakery.)

Here’s my favorite sugar cookie glaze recipe. This is one that it’s a combination of several that I’ve found and “tweaked” a bit. It works wonderfully!

PERFECT SUGAR COOKIE GLAZE

2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
3 T. light corn syrup
4 T. water
2 tsp. vanilla extract or other flavoring
Food coloring (paste is preferred, but liquid coloring will also do)

Blend the powdered sugar, corn syrup, water and vanilla together. Stir in food coloring, a very small amount at a time until you get the color you want (with the paste coloring, lighter colors are generally tastier). Stir well. Using small water color or pastry paint brushes, you can “paint” the glaze onto your cookies. Let the glazed cookies set out for 30-60 minutes to harden. Then you can stack them and they won’t stick.

Here is a photo of some glazed cut-out cookies that I made for a western-themed party:

Happy baking!
~Becky